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Lesson Plan

How to Kill a Superbug

Model evolutionary tradeoffs and play an interactive game to bring natural selection and antibiotic resistance to life.
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How to Kill a Superbug

Model evolutionary tradeoffs and play an interactive game to bring natural selection and antibiotic resistance to life.

Watch Film  View Lesson 
Lesson Overview
Grades:
  • 9-12
Key Concepts:

Evolution, natural selection, and fitness; Mechanisms of antibiotic resistance (MDR); Bacteriophages as therapy against MDR bacteria; Evolutionary tradeoffs; Modeling evolution

Activities:

Interactive evolution board game; Modeling: tracking bacterial evolution under treatment; Data analysis from primary literature and FRQ-style practice

Time Needed:

40-75

minutes

In this lesson, students will become familiar with the public health challenge of multidrug resistant (MDR) bacteria and how bacteriophages can be used to counter MDR bacteria by exploiting evolutionary tradeoffs through selection against resistance in bacterial populations. Students view the video and create models to explore the effects of treatments on infectious bacteria.

The lesson also offers several extension activities, including a board game, analysis of published studies about evolutionary tradeoffs, and Free Response Questions.

Standards Download Lesson

Evolutionary biologist Paul Turner researches how phages can be used against drug resistant bacteria. He offers a glimpse into a future where we can outsmart and ultimately overcome the resilient superbugs that threaten public health.

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NGSS:

  • HS-LS1-2: Develop and use a model to illustrate the hierarchical organization of interacting systems that provide specific functions within multicellular organisms.
  • HS-LS4-3: Apply concepts of statistics and probability to support explanations that organisms with an advantageous heritable trait tend to increase in proportion to organisms lacking this trait.
  • HS-LS4-4: Construct an explanation based on evidence for how natural selection leads to adaptation of populations.

AP Biology:

  • Topic 7.1: Introduction to Natural Selection (7.1.B.1, 7.1.B.2)
  • Topic 7.2: Natural Selection (7.2.A)
  • Topic 7.8: Continuing Evolution (7.8.A.1 iv)

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Dan Vanden Heuvel

Lesson Plan by

Dan Vanden Heuvel

Wood River High School - Hailey, ID

Why I Chose this Film

It exposes students to an interesting and important application of the theory of evolution to address a global crisis.

Dr. Paul Turner describes how phage therapy utilizes the principles of evolution to combat the global challenge of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. The video is accessible and interesting to students with a basic knowledge of evolution and features paper cutout models to demonstrate the main ideas.

How I Taught this Lesson

I designed this microbiology lesson for an AP Biology class. This lesson was  field tested in an 11th-12th Botany & Zoology Lab with 17 students. Students already had an understanding of evolution, so this lesson helped them apply their knowledge and understand how phages infect their host and how scientists are using novel strategies, like phage therapy, to fight antibiotic-resistant infections in humans. This lesson is designed so that students have fun while they learn new concepts and assess their knowledge.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences under Grant No. 2122350 and 1 R25 GM139147. Any opinion, finding, conclusion, or recommendation expressed in these videos are solely those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the views of the Science Communication Lab/iBiology, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, or other Science Communication Lab funders.

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